Since this is beyond a doubt one of the most often asked questions, it certainly deserves an answer. The default settings will very likely get you good to excellent results on 'normal' source material like DVD's. If you like a more thorough answer than 'just stick with the defaults' you can follow some of the guidelines mentioned below.
However, they are not the 'ultimate' settings for everything as there's simply no such thing. Feel free to deviate (yes, become a deviant!) and experiment with the settings once you feel more confident using XviD. Using XviD always requires you to use your own judgement up to a certain point. The settings below are very safe and are here just to get you on your way.

You have three options here. MPEG sharpens the image, and is good for basic high-bitrate (>1000kbps) encodes, and H.263 softens the image which is better for medium-bitrate (800-1000kbps) encodes. The last option allows the entry of your own custom quantization matrix, which is recommended to maximize quality.

So, let's assume we wish to change the video to 320 (wide) by 240 (high). Enter '320' in the text box next to 'Width' and '240 ' into the text box next to 'Height'. Next choose the correct aspect ratio (the shape of your video file – normally 4:3) from the 'Source' and 'Destination' drop down menus. Then , when you are finished press 'OK'.

FACTS: If you're unfamiliar with using feet and inches for height in English, here's a quick overview: If you're 5 feet 10 inches tall, and someone asks how tall you are, you could answer this way: I'm five ten. Another possible answer: I'm five foot ten. Japanese people use only centimeters.

… Linux needs root privileges. Therefore, you have to have root privileges when starting Wireshark, else you can't capture data. Please note that you don't have to login as root when starting your computer, you can use su(1) or sudo(8) for that purpose. However, this remains unsecure as the dissectors, the parts of Wireshark which parse the captured data, run with root privileges as they did before. A much safer solution would be to su(1) to root, then use the bundled dumpcap to dump the data (for example, you can evoke dumpcap by using "dumpcap -w ./dumpfile", which will dump the packets to the file "dumpfile" in the current working directory. See "dumpcap -h" for details). You could also use tcpdump for this purpose. The advantage of this solution is, while dumpcap/tcpdump still run as root, you can run Wireshark as a ordinary user and load the data you captured previously, so effectively this is kinda "privilege separation by hand".

The problem with answering this question is that those asking it know only OSes where viruses, trojan-horse programs, worms, nasty Javascripts, ActiveX controls with destructive payloads, and ordinary misbehaved applications are a constant threat to their computing. Therefore, they refuse to believe Linux could be different, no matter what they hear.

Bruce Lee is highly regarded as one of the most influential martial artist of all time. His amazing physical features, fitness, and skills made him a cultural icon. But perhaps unknown to some is his mental strength that contributed much to his success. He believed that any knowledge ultimately led to self-knowledge, and said that his chosen method of self-expression was martial arts.

The senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development team has reason not to be. One of his most notable works, the Windows 2000 operating system, has a security record that is nothing to boast about. In fact, it's downright dismal, many experts say.

Ah yes, there's that all too familiar sound of tightening budgets and the tossing aside of those things perceived as non-essential. Training's death knell reverberates in my head like the sound of an ill-tuned vesper bell. Your dilemma is that you need to learn Linux but you have no money to buy training — what do you do — wait indefinitely for money to return to the coffers, download Linux and fumble through it on your own? Or, do you take the initiative and find some inexpensive or free learning resources?

There are lots of good tools in the Free Open Source Software world for capturing and editing video, but common to making almost any movie is a basic understanding of the steps to building a good story using a storyboard editor. This article will help you take the very first step toward creating a movie by using the very simple storyboard video editing program called Kino to create a story.

A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.

"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright."

The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.

Webmin a browser based program that you can use to manage a Linux server, from a remote location. It is an excellent tool for those who are making the transition from a GUI based system to the Linux command line. However, if you are going to use Webmin take a few security precautions first.

This theme gives the clean, glossy look of the XP and Vista "Strata" icons to Ubuntu's Human theme. I took the XP version of Strata and changed the colors in Gimp to better fit the Human theme. I think it fits pretty well.

OpenOffice is a highly popular, free, cross-platform office suite that you can install and use alongside or in lieu of Microsoft Office as your software of choice for creating and editing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

OpenOffice extensions allow you to … extend the basic functionality of the software and make it more suited to your needs, better looking and more productive. The concept is similar to Firefox addons, one of the main reasons for the great popularity of the Mozilla browser. Today, we will learn how to boost our OpenOffice with fresh looks and new tricks.

To learn more about OpenOffice, you may want to read my review. Now, follow me.

The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. PDF documents are imported in Draw and Impress to preserve the layout and to allow basic editing. It is the perfect solution for changing dates, numbers or small portions of text. Native PDF forms are not yet imported.

The next development step will focuses more on the edit capabilities and less on layout by using the Writer.

The PDF Import extension will also enable the PDF export into a hybrid PDF file, which is a PDF with the embedded source file as ODF. Hybrid PDF files will be opened in StarOffice as an ODF file without any layout differences, while users without StarOffice can open the PDF part of the hybrid file.

This is just a beta version and it requires the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 to work. Please help us to optimize this Extension, any feedback is important for us. Find details about the preferred channel in this
GullFOSS article.

If you need to manage graphics, images (such as JPEG, PNG, GIF images) or pictures of any kind, or handle animation in your programs, including writing games, drawing 3D or 2D pictures, you might like to consider the graphics libraries, 3D engines, 2D engines, image manipulation source code (etc) listed here. Some of these are actually production code, used in commercial products.